MY COVID JOURNEY FROM HELL

Jan was pregnant when she got the coronavirus. What followed were nightmare months of tragedy and a desperate fight for life. She tells YOU her harrowing story

IF THERE’S one message she wants to get across, it’s this: don’t be complacent.

The third wave of the pandemic is here and if ever there was a time to banish Covid fatigue, it’s now.

Jan Simonsz-Coe, a 35-year-old manager of a Cape Town-based medical practice, lost her baby and very nearly her life to the virus.

She spent 79 days in ICU – and just as she was recovering, she lost her mother to cancer. She’s now sharing her harrowing story as she believes “cautionary tales are imperative right now”. Here is her story.

IT’S so easy to forget the reality of the situation we’re in. There’s also a certain level of stigma attached to the things I’ve been through and people should not be forced to suffer in silence. I want to shed a light on my experiences – for myself as much as everyone else.

My husband, David, and I had longed for a baby for years but the timing was never right. Eventually we decided to go for it despite the pandemic – largely because my mother had been battling cancer for more than 12 years and I wanted to have a baby before she died.

I got pregnant but I was brutally sick and so, after the first trimester, we headed to the coast for a break. I started to feel better and began to think I’d turned a corner – little did I know what lay ahead.

We were still on holiday when my husband started showing signs of Covid. The next week was a jumble of chaos and quarantine which ended in 10 of us in my family getting Covid. My mom and my dad, who also has comorbidities, were among them.